Report: MH370 Pinger Battery Had Expired Before the Plane Disappeared

It's one of the few revelations for a major report released on the one-year anniversary of the plane's disappearance

Exactly one year after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared off radar screens, the Malaysian government just released a massive report revealing that the battery on one of the underwater locator beacons had been expired for at least a year. But it's not clear whether this lapse had any impact on the subsequent search for the missing jetliner, a quest that has so far failed to come anywhere close to solving the biggest mystery in aviation history: how a 330-ton commercial jetliner could simply vanish without a trace.

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Aviation experts say that just because a battery had passed its expiration date doesn't necessarily mean it wouldn't have been capable of emitting some pings from a submerged aircraft. "It is possible, we just don't know," said John Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member and an aviation accident investigator. He said that pingers are certified to emit signals for 30 to 40 days after a crash, but that's just the required minimum —they can often last longer. An older battery might work for less than that time, or not at all.

How could a 330-ton commercial jetliner could simply vanish without a trace?

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The revelation should renew the pressure on the industry to come up with better and more reliable systems for recovering the black boxes on aircraft, which has been a top priority since Air France 447 plunged into the Atlantic in 2009. In that case, even though investigators knew where to look, it took more than two years and many millions of dollars to find that plane and to retrieve the recorders. Even a more modest change, such as prolonging the battery life of the beacons beyond the required 30-day minimum would be welcome. Other potential fixes include installing a set of duplicate recorders that would automatically eject in the event of a crash and could float on water.

Meanwhile, the search for the MH370 Boeing 777 and the 239 people aboard is continuing in a remote swath of the southern Indian Ocean where a tantalizing scrap of satellite data suggested the plane may have crashed about seven hours after it left radar-controlled airspace. The jet dropped off screens one hour into a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Search vessels are combing the depths of the sea and will wrap up in May,

The nearly 600 pages of the report from the Malaysian Transport Ministry contained little else of substance, frustrating those who had expected a more thorough account of what the investigation has – or, more to the point, has not – turned up in the past year. But it did paint a detailed picture of the confusion among air traffic controllers that occurred after the flight crew failed to check in with Vietnamese controllers and did not respond to repeated calls from the ground. But why that did not trigger a full-blown search earlier is still unknown.